Where It All Goes Down
Montana may claim the title of "Big Sky Country,"but not to the Hansa family. O.E. Rölvaag seems obsessed with describing the sky in this book, but it makes total sense when you realize that sky is all you have to look at when there's nothing but flat, brown land on every side of you.
He opens the book with countless descriptions of the sky and especially the sunset, trying to convey a sense of how beautiful the protagonist, Per Hansa, finds this new land he plans on conquering:
The afternoon breeze lulled, and finally dropped off altogether. The sun, whose golden lustre had faded imperceptibly into a reddish hue, shone now with a dull light, yet strong and across the red. (1.1.2.28)
Yeah, that actually sounds amazingly pretty. Maybe we'll book our spring break in North Dakota… Florida seems played out.
As the book unfolds, though, we realize that the bare, windswept prairie isn't always a beautiful sight. There's also something disturbing about its vastness, as we find when Rölvaag later writes,
At the moment when the sun closed his eye, the vastness of the plain seemed to rise up on every hand—and suddenly the landscape had grown desolate; something bleak and cold had come into the silence, filling it with terror… (1.1.2.28)
Ooof. Never mind. We're rebooking our plane tickets to Tampa.
Rölvaag's descriptions remind us that the American prairie is capable of great beauty and great terror. Also, its vastness has a way of making human life seem really puny and insignificant, in spite of all Per Hansa's ambition.
On a more historical note, there was a huge influx of Scandinavian immigrants to North Dakota in the late 1800s. If you've ever seen Fargo and wondered why Frances McDormand sounds so adorable, you can thank this wave of immigration. The famous North Dakotan accent (along with the equally-awesome Minnesota accent) has its roots in Scandinavian language cadences. It's also responsible for things like North Dakota's penchant for lutefisk… which we're too scared to even taste. Can't win 'em all, North Dakota.